Hewlett-Packard Co. last month released a new high-end disk array designed for firms seeking zero downtime.
The array is the HP StorageWorks XP10000, which began shipping during the last week in July. The XP10000 starts at $400,000. The disk array is targeted at enterprise customers or customers looking for storage consolidation.
“It is a disk array for customers who want superior availability for mission critical applications to run 24/7 with zero downtown. I like to call it the most bulletproof array on the planet,” said Parag Suri, HP category business manager StorageWorks Division HP Canada.I like to call it the most bulletproof array on the planet.Parag Suri>Text Suri likens the XP10000 to non-stop servers that most banks use for online transaction processing as both have similar design architecture that include redundancy and swappable hardware.
“The cache is fully mirrored, there is no way to bring the system down unless you pull the power out. You can do upgrades for the firmware while the system is running and you can add more capacity,” he said.
The new disk array can connect up to 48 hosts and scale up to 35 terabytes. Suri said later this year the XP10000 should be able to scale up to 240 disks or 69TB.
From a Canadian marketplace perspective, Suri also said the XP10000 fits medium-sized enterprises from a scalability, availability and performance perspective and still won’t cost firms the moon.
According to Vasu Daggupaty, IDC Canada reasearch analyst, the new XP product is a natural evolution for HP.
“It is building out their product line-up to suit the needs of the customer. [HP] are adding more functionality in towards the lower end of the high range [models] so this smooths the transition from an Enterprise Virtual Array to XP,” Daggupaty said.
The XP10000 joins the XP12000 in HP’s StorageWorks XP family of products. The XP12000 is the big brother of 10000 that was released last year and offers more performance and scalability (up to 1152 disks or about 350TB) and is able to connect up to 220 hosts.
One company that is using the XP12000 is Mississauga, Ont.-based Psion Teklogik, a global provider of mobile computing solutions. It started using the XP12000 this past February.
“We were looking to add a little bit on our disaster recovery side [and] we wanted to leverage the business copy and get into disk-to-disk, said Pat Burke, manager of IT services for Psion Teklogix. He added, if the XP1000 was available at the time of migration to XP12000 he would have gone with the XP10000 instead.
“[The XP10000] probably would have met our needs…. It’s as enterprise and mission critical as the 12000 in my opinion and…a whole lot cheaper,” he said.
In terms of disaster recovery, both the XP10000 and 12000 have a solution called the HP StorageWorks Snapshop XP that does local replication of data. Burke said he is considering using the XP10000 for disaster recovery.
What distinguishes the XP10000 from other disk arrays out in the market, Suri said, is its tight integration of XP storage products with HP servers so it appears as a common management interface. As well, the XP10000 is a frame-based disk array where if you want to move to higher capacity all you do is add another frame and keep on adding disk drives to it, unlike its competitors, which Suri said, do a more “a forklift upgrade” to increase capacity.
QuickLink: 053957
Related links:
